Following the money

An embarrassing day for New York arts patrons—and as it turns out, Columbia and its peer institutions—came near the end of the summer when Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, outed prominent philanthropic oil billionaires Charles and David Koch as the secret benefactors of the Tea Party movement. Yes, wrote Mayer, the very same brothers who funded the American Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur wing, chair the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and whose name is emblazoned on Lincoln Center’s theater building. Closer to home for us at Columbia, the Koch Foundation sponsors research at top American universities and entices young people with grants, internships, and jobs. The distressing revelation of the men behind the money is an awakening, a call for us to pay attention to the political interests at play in funding for research. It is an essential question of academic integrity.

With a combined net worth of $35 billion, rivaled only by the fortunes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, the owners of the Koch oil conglomerate have outspent Exxon Mobil in fighting anti-climate-change legislation and used their sway with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to prevent formaldehyde from being labeled a carcinogen. The Kochs founded the Mercatus Center, which made a list of the environmental regulations most harmful to industry profits, with the goal of having these laws rolled back (Koch Industries is a top-ten polluter worldwide.) The Kochs also created Astroturf citizens groups— Citizens for a Sound Economy, Americans for Prosperity, Patients United Now—to train Tea Party leaders and to lobby for the interests of large corporations. Few of these private citizens would materially benefit from Koch-supported causes, like the reduction of corporate taxes or legal pollution of waterways.

Because the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allows corporations, as well as non-profits, to conceal political expenditures, it is impossible to say, for example, how much of the $168 million spent by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation (between 1998 and 2008) has gone toward reversing environmental regulations or progressive tax policy. I suspect it is not a negligible sum.

What we do know, though, is that these organizations fund research at many top universities, including Columbia’s peer institutions. I spoke to an employee at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, who said the family has given funds to Brown, Duke, MIT, NYU, UCLA, and a slew of state schools (many in the south). Much of this funding is devoted to environmental studies that could give a veneer of scientific respectability to the deregulation of industries that pollute.

The financial stakes are high for the Koch brothers. Increased corporate taxes, stricter environmental regulation, and alternative energy solutions threaten the profitability of Koch Oil. There is a great danger inherent in the prospect of Koch-funded research at Columbia or its peer institutions: the possibility that the underwriters of research stand to gain from its results, as was the case in the faulty formaldehyde study. Scientific research is key to the democratic process; its abuse is anti-democratic.

The Foundation employee with whom I spoke assured me that it “does not take any political considerations into account when deciding how to best allocate funds,” including for the internships it endows.

If this is the case, young people could harness the Kochs’ charitable endeavors to frustrate the oil billionaires’ economic interests, perhaps even for research that could become a basis for increased regulation of oil companies. On Monday, for example, the New York Times reported that the investigation of the BP oil spill’s environmental consequences has been stymied for “lack of cash.” This while research that seeks to invalidate climate change charges ahead.

Charity has a great potential to do good, but especially in the academic setting, it is impossible to ignore the fact that money comes with ties. The Koch-funded Gilder Lehrman Institute uses Columbia University library resources for research (as far as I know) without political bent. But students have a responsibility to be wary about projects funded by morally ambiguous—or in this case, bankrupt—sources. The influence of that money threatens the integrity of their work.

Amanda Gutterman is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in English. The Far Side of the Familiar runs alternate Wednesdays.